touchstone

Definitions

ntouchstonea basis for comparison; a reference point against which other things can be evaluated"the schools comply with federal standards","they set the measure for all subsequent work"

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Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary

TouchstoneAny test or criterion by which the qualities of a thing are tried."The foregoing doctrine affords us also a touchstone for the trial of spirits."

Touchstone(Min) Lydian stone; basanite; -- so called because used to test the purity of gold and silver by the streak which is left upon the stone when it is rubbed by the metal. See Basanite.

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Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

ntouchstoneA very fine-grained dark-colored variety of schist or jasper, used for trying the quality of alloys of the precious metals. The alloy is rubbed on the stone, and the color of the streak is compared with that of various alloys of known composition prepared for that purpose and called touch-needles. It was formerly extensively used for ascertaining the fineness of gold, but the facility and rapidity with which exact assays are now made have rendered the touchstone a matter of much less importance. It was the “Lydian stone” of the ancients, under which name (Λυδια λίθος) it is mentioned and its nse described by Bacchylidee (about 450 b. c.), while Theophrastus calls it both the Lydian and the Heraclean stone (λίθος (Ηρακλεία). Βασανίτης, βασανιτης λίθος and βάσανος were names given to it by various Greek authors. It was the coticula of Pliny, whose basanites was a dark-colored, very compact igneous rock, probably a variety of basalt, basaltes and basanites having at a very early period become inextricably confused with each other in meaning. By some these words are believed to have been originally different; by others it is thought that basaltes was a corruption of basanites.

ntouchstoneAny test or criterion by which the qualities of a thing are tried: as, money, the touchstone of common honesty.

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Chambers's Twentieth Century Dictionary

Touchstonea kind of compact basalt or stone for testing gold or silver by the streak of the touch-needle: any test

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Quotations

Beaumont and Fletcher

“Calamity is man's true touchstone.”

J. William Galbraith

“Familiarity may breed contempt in some areas of human behavior, but in the field of social ideas it is the touchstone of acceptability.”

George Meredith

“The season of love is the carnival of egoism and it brings a touchstone to our natures.”

Publius Cornelius Tacitus

“Prosperity is the measure or touchstone of virtue, for it is less difficult to bear misfortune than to remain uncorrupted by pleasure.”

Etymology

Chambers's Twentieth Century Dictionary

Fr. toucher—from Old High Ger. zucchen (Ger. zucken), to move, to draw.

Usage

In literature:

But mind one thing, Master Touchstone!

"Seven Miles to Arden" by Ruth Sawyer

Let us be thankful, and not angry, that we must accept it as our touchstone.

"The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867" by Various

Clothes were the main touchstone.

"Jennie Gerhardt" by Theodore Dreiser

The touchstone of good manners is the way in which a man behaves to his superiors or inferiors.

"Social Life" by Maud C. Cooke

And absolute results to posterity are the fatal touchstone of opinions in the past.

In poetry:

When slender rapiers, proud with gems,
Sneered at the sun their haughty hues,
And Touchstone wit and apothegms
Laughed down the long, cool avenues.

"An Antique" by Madison Julius Cawein

What Malvern is the day is, and it's touchstone
Gray velvet, or moonmarked; rich, or bare as bone;
One looks towards Malvern and is tuned to the whole,
The world swings round him, as the Bear to the Pole.

"The Comparison" by Ivor Gurney

In news:

Here is another link to the podcast in case the play button is not visible: Touchstone Interview.

In science:

This sequence contains three separate touchstones for an understanding of the cuprates: the Mott insulator, which is known to result from very strong electron-electron repulsion and is antiferromagnetically ordered, the d-wave superconductor, and the overdoped metal.

Tl2Ba2CuO6+d Brings Spectroscopic Probes Deep Into the Overdoped Regime of the High-Tc Cuprates

Algebraic regularity occurs in many different ways; it might be related to the number of generators of certain modules, to tensorial absorption of suitable touchstone algebras, or to structural properties of homological invariants.

Nuclear dimension and Z-stability of pure C*-algebras

We report the results of an analysis of all Spitzer/MIPS 24 µm observations of HD 209458b, one of the touchstone ob jects in the study of irradiated giant planet atmospheres.

These are the two touchstone ob jects in the study of irradiated giant exoplanets, both because they were discovered relatively early on and because they orbit especially bright (as seen from Earth) host stars.

SN 1987a was a touchstone for our understanding of core collapse supernovae (e.g.

The Phenomena of High Energy Astrophysics

Since their existence is inevitable in ﬂavor multiplet schemes, they can be considered touchstones of quartet models.

Study of kaonic final states in $\pi^-p$ at $190\,\textrm{GeV}$

However, the test of such void models may ultimately lie in the future detection of the discrepancy between longitudinal and transverse expansion rates, a touchstone of inhomogeneous models.

Testing the Copernican Principle with Hubble Parameter

Each of the suggested alternatives to the standard picture of CP violation may be tested against particular experimental touchstones. A key experiment to disprove the superweak model of CP violation in the kaon system will be the observation of a nonzero value of ǫ′ .

Present and Future Aspects of CP Violation

As everyone knows, second quantization is the touchstone of quantum ﬁeld theory.

Quantum Mechanics as a Classical Theory VIII: Second Quantization

The presence of crystalline silicates in cometary dust is a touchstone for models of cometary formation and Solar System history.

Cometary diversity and cometary families

Fermat varieties have been touchstones for various conjectures in number theory and algebraic geometry.

On the regulator of Fermat motives and generalized hypergeometric functions